John Gilmore wrote:

A pentium is definitely up to this task. I've been running it the whole time on a slower 40MB SPARCstation-2 (that also runs netnews and general computing). Give it a big /var/spool partition (mine is 60MB) because every message will sit in the queue for days (*somebody* on the list will have an unreachable name server or MX server until the msg times out). Give it lots of RAM and paging space, since each sendmail process takes about 2MB virtual, 1.4MB physical, and you will have dozens running at the same time.

The new version of majordomo (that allows confirmation of subscriptions) will help a lot. It needs a small patch though, to do exponential backoff on the lock file, or when you get a flood of messages, thirty majordomo processes will burn up the whole machine trying and failing to get the lock file.

You'll need a BIG mailbox for the bounce messages, and someone (or some unwritten software) to scan it every day or two and delete the lusers whose mailboxes are full or who dumped their account without unsubscribing. The bounce mailbox on toad gets between 1 and 4MB of email a day; more when the list is under attack.

You'll want to run the latest version of BIND on the machine, too, since doing DNS name-lookups on a thousand email addresses is expensive. You want them all in the in-memory cache on the same machine. The name daemon burns about 7MB virtual, 5MB real RAM once its cache gets loaded.

Make sure that every message sent to the list gets into at least two logfiles -- on separate partitions, in case one fills up. At least if you want to have an archive of what's been sent.

...

I can provide a pentium box running Linux with a T1 connection to MAE-West to host the list, if there is still interest.

Make sure you are getting "transit" service to the Internet, instead of trying to cheap out with "peering" to a few major networks. Without transit service ("we'll carry your packets to anywhere even if the destination is not on our network") you won't be able to route packets to some places on the net. This will cause mail to those subscribers to sit in the queue for days and then bounce.

The real issue is how willing you are to put your own time into dealing with problems. Not only do things go wrong by themselves, but there are malicious assholes in the world who will deliberately make trouble for you just because they like to. Spending a day or two cleaning up the mess is just part of the job. Check your level of committment two or three times before taking on the task -- so you won't end up getting disgusted after a month or two and putting the list's existence into crisis again. It's not a "set it up and forget it" kind of operation.

Listen to it, John is absolutely right. Running a big mailing list is an incredible commitment and it is important to realize what you are getting into. Another suggestion may be to set sendmail expire option to one day instead of five so that messages that cannot be delivered would bounce faster and not clog the queue. - Igor.